Independent Learning Exercises.

As with any piece of design, in this module it is important for you to have a feel for why one should wish to represent and remember the past. Without this feel the construction of a multimedia heritage presentation will be simply a forensic, arms-length process - which might result in a slick site, but won't be a pleasure to engage in.

Visit a heritage location or object early on in the module ... perhaps just wander down to the local museum in Oaklands Park. While you are looking, ask yourself some fundamental questions about how and why people try and stay in contact with the past - a past that we can only know by looking at representations (a wide-ranging notion, which includes objects in settings) in the present:

• what purposes can such remembrance serve?
• why does it seem to give people pleasure? what kind of pleasures does it give?
• what are the relationships between reading formal history books and visiting real places and objects, guide book in hand?
• what role does careful display and interpretation play in the experience of a heritage location?

As you would expect, I don't think that there are any definitive answers to such questions, but every designer who produces heritage interpretation materials has to arrive at some personal - if temporary - answers. These answers will appear in the form of content, layout, colour schemes, choice of images and words, etc. in subtle ways.